Back in February we told you about Intel's upcoming 313 series of SSD's that are set to replace the 311 series for use as hard drive caching. Now the drives have been officially launched, even though it was a very quiet launch, with the drives available in retail as of today and on top of all that, there are even some early benchmark figures out.

Back in February we told you about Intel's upcoming 313 series of SSD's that are set to replace the 311 series for use as hard drive caching. Now the drives have been officially launched, even though it was a very quiet launch, with the drives available in retail as of today and on top of all that, there are even some early benchmark figures out.

As we mentioned back in February, the SSD 313 series comes in sizes of 20 and 24GB and we now know the difference between the two SKUs. Oddly enough the 24GB SKU features a slower sequential read speed of 160MB/s compared to 220MB/s for the 20GB SKU, but when it comes to write performance, the 24GB SKU is somewhat faster at 115MB/s compared to 100MB/s for the 20GB SKU. Compared to the 311 series the write speed of the 20GB SKU has been increased by 30MB/s, but both SKU's have slower random read IOPS than the 311, although the 24GB SKU offers slightly better write IOPS.

Retail pricing ended up being higher than our earlier pricing, with the 20GB SKU going for US$120 (S$150) and the 24GB SKU coming in at US$140 (S$175), in other words US$20 more per SKU than expected. There's no price difference between the 2.5-inch and mSATA models, which is a bit odd considering the reduction in materials used for the mSATA models. If you're planning on using Intel's Rapid Start and Smart Response technology at the same time with an Ivy Bridge CPU on a 7-series motherboard, make sure you get a model with as much spare space as you have RAM, i.e. 4GB of RAM equals the 20GB model and 8GB of RAM equals the 24GB model.

Greek website Hwbox has already given the new 20GB model a quick run-through and the drive appears to perform in line with Intel's numbers, although the idea here is of course not the raw SSD performance, but rather how well it performs as a cache for a hard drive. Generally this is something that takes a few runs so that the files can be cached on the SSD for the next time they're being used. Nothing earthshattering came to light in the benchmarks, but you can find them by clicking on the link below.